reading

Dylan Jones’s engrossing, magisterial biography of David Bowie is unlike any Bowie story ever written. Drawn from over 180 interviews with friends, rivals, lovers, and collaborators, some of whom have never before spoken about their relationship with Bowie, this oral history weaves a hypnotic spell as it unfolds a remarkable rise to stardom and an unparalleled artistic path. Tracing Bowie’s life from the English suburbs to London to New York to Los Angeles, Berlin, and beyond, its collective voices describe a man profoundly shaped by his relationship with his schizophrenic half-brother Terry; an intuitive artist who could absorb influences through intense relationships and yet drop people cold when they were no longer of use; and a social creature equally comfortable partying with John Lennon and dining with Frank Sinatra. By turns insightful and deliciously gossipy, DAVID BOWIE is as intimate a portrait as may ever be drawn. It sparks with admiration and grievances, lust and envy, as the speakers bring you into studios and bedrooms they shared with Bowie, and onto stages and film sets, opening corners of his mind and experience that transform our understanding of both artist and art. Including illuminating, never-before-seen material from Bowie himself, drawn from a series of Jones’s interviews with him across two decades, DAVID BOWIE is an epic, unforgettable cocktail-party conversation about a man whose enigmatic shapeshifting and irrepressible creativity produced one of the most sprawling, fascinating lives of our time.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

New York Times bestselling author Dylan Jones has written twenty books on subjects as diverse as music and politics and fashion and photography. He has been an editor at the Observer, the Sunday Times, i-D, The Face, and Arena, a columnist for the Guardian and the Independent, and is currently the editor in chief of GQ. He has won Magazine Editor of the Year eleven times, and been awarded the prestigious Mark Boxer Award, while his book on the former British prime minister, David Cameron, was shortlisted for the Channel 4 Political Book of the Year. He is a trustee of the Hay Festival, a board member of the British Fashion Council, and an Advisory Council member of the Norman Mailer Colony. He was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Honours List in 2013. He lives in London and Powys with his family.

‘Dylan Jones made absolutely the right decision to frame his superb life of David Bowie as a multi-voiced oral biography. David Bowie: A Life suits the shape-shifting, beguiling, enigmatic complexities of its subject perfectly. It’s hard to imagine anything that will do Bowie better justice.’

‘There have been many books about David Bowie … but Dylan Jones’s is among the best … For any admirer of the great man … [an] admirable book.’

‘Dylan Jones has excavated the cacophony of voices that make up a life and curated a phenomenal portrait of the artist from childhood to the final days. The witnesses who comprise this oral biography animate the pages like characters in a non-fiction novel. Damn nigh peerless.’

‘The definitive account of the great man’s life, in the words of those who knew him best … lively, funny and warm – and the story, even the well-known bits, still staggers and amazes … It’s a brilliant story, and it is tremendously well-told here.’

‘Worthy of the Starman … Of all the volumes to appear since Bowie’s death, this is the most useful: an oral history that brings together the most incisive reminiscences and memorials.’

‘An affectionate, sometimes surprising, always fascinating picture of a Star Man in the real world.’

‘There is literally no better way to spend your time than by reading about the late, great, beautiful and brilliant David Bowie, brought to you by fellow superfan and GQ editor Dylan Jones.’

For my Stargirls, Sarah, Edie & Georgia

PREFACE

On 31 October 2016, as the rest of London was being swamped by hordes of drunken roisterers in nylon skeleton costumes and Donald Trump Halloween masks, many carrying neon pumpkins and covered in fake blood and blankets of spooky cobweb spray, Sotheby’s in Bond Street was an oasis of old-school gentility. All day the art handlers in the Mayfair auction house had been putting the finishing touches to the Bowie/Collector public preview, straightening up the Graham Sutherlands and the Damien Hirsts and struggling to reposition a gigantic Ettore Sottsass sideboard. Tonight there was going to be a private opening dinner for one hundred lucky people, and the exhibition needed to be inch-perfect. By 7:45, the gallery was almost full as the likes of Tracey Emin, Keith Tyson, Elisabeth Murdoch, Robert Fox, Jasper Conran, Nick Grimshaw, Sam Smith, Saffron Aldridge, Alexander McQueen’s Sarah Burton, U2’s Adam Clayton, Bowie’s art consultant Kate Chertavian, and dozens of other luminaries from the worlds of art, music, and publishing made their way slowly through the halls – many taking selfies in front of a wall-sized blow-up of the ‘Heroes’ album cover, some mimicking Bowie’s famous Erich Heckel hand gesture.

His greatest hits playing at entry-level volume, anecdotes were shared, conversations remembered, and even more imagined. Some of Bowie’s friends were there, as well as many people who had worked with him. There was even the odd journalist or two. There were people there who shouldn’t have been there, and many who weren’t who ought to have been, but then such is the nature of the London society dinner.

The artworks themselves seemed to glisten like evidence, every one of them a pit stop in Bowie’s life, each purchase a punctuation mark, a story. Standing in these rooms, looking at David Bowie’s extraordinary art collection (most of which had been in storage for years, and included examples of outsider art, Surrealism, and contemporary African art, as well as two hundred works by many of the most important British artists of the twentieth century, including Frank Auerbach – ‘I want to sound like that looks,’ Bowie once said about one of the artist’s swollen oil paintings), it was impossible not to feel his significance, as if any of us needed any more proof, because as a collector he suddenly seemed more important than any of the trinkets in the room. Here was a man who hadn’t just inhabited the verge of greatness, he had stood in its very middle. An autodidact who tried to map his own cultural life, and who ended up creating one of the most important cultural lives of the last fifty years, David Bowie was his very own creation, his very own work of art.

As we sat down to eat, a carefully placed book about an alcoholic San Franciscan dentist stared up at me. In September 2013, to mark the Canadian opening of the David Bowie Is exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the curators, Geoffrey Marsh and Victoria Broackes, released a list of Bowie’s hundred favourite books. And at Sotheby’s I found one of them on my plate: McTeague, Frank Norris’s graphic portrayal of the seamy side of survival in turn-of-the-century urban America, first published in 1899, and first read by David Bowie some time towards the end of the 60s.

Each of the hundred dinner guests had been given one of Bowie’s favourite books – my neighbours had been given The Outsider and The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea – an unexpectedly delightful touch to celebrate the opening of the show. As the guests worked their way through caviar salt and gin-cured salmon, followed by salt-marsh lamb rack and wellington, you could tell some of them were trying to work out if there was a reason they had been given their particular book. Tracey Emin got A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (‘A funny, slapstick one,’ she said); film producer Paul McGuinness got Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess; and the chairman of HSBC got Madame Bovary.

There were many speeches that night, all of which mentioned Bowie’s profound curiosity and passionate espousal of the artists he collected. Simon Hucker, Sotheby’s senior specialist in modern and postwar British art, spoke, as did the auction house’s Frances Christie and Oliver Barker. In the flurry of activity preceding the auction, Beth Greenacre, the curator of Bowie’s art collection since the turn of the century, said that many of the artists ‘challenged the past and its established orthodoxies,’ artists who were intent on creating a new language. ‘He allowed us to look at the world in a new way and the artists he collected are absolutely doing that,’ she said. A few weeks earlier she had told the Financial Times, ‘There is something very English about [the work], and that is what David was: he retained his passport, no matter where he lived. And these pictures form a narrative about him, and his interests. He was an observer, and he was an historian. He really looked back at history to understand his current position, and that is what these artists were doing too.’

Quoted in The Guardian around the same time, Simon Hucker said that Bowie had been attracted to artists with whom he saw a connection – often outsiders or cultural refugees trying to break with their own history. This was the boy from postwar Brixton with his sights set on the world. ‘It comes back to him being really interested in who he was,’ said Hucker, ‘the culture he grew up in, the world of his parents, the world of his childhood.’

This was a sentiment echoed at Sotheby’s. ‘It’s so weird, so strange,’ said a friend of mine. ‘Looking at all the stuff on these walls, it’s like he’s been everywhere, but also like he never left. His whole life is here.’

I make it a thing, when I gazelle onstage to believe in myself,

I make it a thing, to glance in window panes and look pleased with myself.

— DAVID BOWIE, ‘CANDIDATE’ ( ALT. VERSION), 1974

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First of all, I would like to personally thank the 182 people who agreed to be interviewed for, or contributed to, this book. This book is their book, as it contains their testimonies, their own stories. I hope they feel I’ve done them all justice. I spoke to people all over the world, in London, Paris, Milan, Miami, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Arizona, Cardiff, Sussex, Montreal, Essex, Sydney, Brixton, Bromley, Beckenham, Cambridge, Hay-on-Wye, Ipswich, Woodbridge … everybody talk about, pop music!

Obviously the Bowie book industry is operating on something of a different scale than it was when he was still alive. Since his enforced retirement midway through the Noughties the books started to come out on an almost six-monthly basis, but since his death there has been a tsunami. Many of the books written about Bowie are biographies of the metaphor that we have come to know as ‘Bowie’; I wanted to write about the man, the person himself. Of course, there are many who oversee their very own Bowie industries, and many more who have taken the opportunity to tell their stories in long form; and who can blame them. For this book I wanted to cast the net as wide as possible, and as well as focusing on the many tall poppies who knew and worked with David over the years, I also spoke to the raft of people who perhaps previously hadn’t had the opportunity to tell their stories with as much encouragement or fanfare, people who had been involved with him before he was a star, in his pomp, and during the long stretches of post-imperial fame. I’d like to thank them all – the musicians who worked with Bowie, the family friends, professional friends, childhood acquaintances, lovers, actors, producers, directors, stylists, artists, curators, journalists, photographers, promoters, art directors, publishers, publicists, authors, designers, comedians, fans, boldface names, everyone. As a form of history, the oral biography has the capacity to be more honest than others, and the lack of subjectivity employed by the editor should enable the truth to shine through. But then, who ever remembers an event in precisely the same way? As Bertrand Russell said, ‘When a man tells you he knows about anything, you are safe in inferring he is an inexact man.’ Yet the recollections contained here, many of which include minor contradictions, have produced a fascinating prism of whatever the truth actually is. A few of the testimonies have had to come from sources outside of my own work, as some of the significant people who came into contact with Bowie have long since passed on (John Lennon, Mick Ronson, Luther Vandross, Tony Scott, Ron Asheton, and so on), while there were others, such as Iman Mohamed Abdulmajid and Coco Schwab, for instance, who were impossible for me to pin down. These other sources include The Black Collegian Magazine, Bowiewonderworld.com, the British Library Archives, the Daily Mail, Davidbowie.com, Empire, DavidBowie. com, Entertainment Weekly, The Guardian, LA Record, Legs McNeill, Mojo, Musician, Music Scene, National Public Radio, the New York Times, NME, Nineteen, Oocities.org, BBC Radio 2, The Reflex, Francis Schoenberger, the Sunday Times, Uncut. I am grateful to the generosity of those authors in allowing me to include them here.

All of the quotes included here from David Bowie himself are taken from the seven formal interviews I conducted with him over the years, along with some quotes from an interview commissioned for i-D back in 1987 when I was still the editor (and for which I wrote many of the questions), used with the kind permission of Tricia Jones (who conducted the interview), plus one quote from a BBC radio series, Bowie Verbatim, another from a speech Bowie gave to the Berklee College of Music in 1999, and one from Hugh Thomson’s interview with him for Five Years. After his death, Bowie’s interviews started to take on a new poignancy, something I started to see myself when I looked back through my own interviews with him. Things I skipped over, or took for granted at the time, now seemed strangely loaded, heavy with meaning. They certainly helped me frame this book.

David Bowie never forgot to connect. Having struggled for a decade to make it in an industry which he often thought was collectively conspiring against him, little was left to chance, and the ruthlessness with which he assaulted his audience when he finally did become successful was matched only by the extraordinary quality of the material, and the stagecraft, that he used as ammunition. Whereas in the 60s Bowie was always slightly behind the curve, as the 70s clicked in, he inched ahead of it, peering at the future through a Manichean viewfinder. He showed that what he was doing was not a trend, but rather a direction, one that would change on a whim, or indeed with the wind. He excelled at the art of individualism, rarely tacking towards the centre and relentlessly moving forward. In this age when there is indiscriminate access to almost everything, it would have been difficult for Bowie to operate so successfully, but back in the 70s he was a divining rod, his own as well as ours. His talent was so immense it was often bewildering. But then he’d learned how to use what ‘little’ talent (his term) he had to its fullest effect. Bowie often said that God’s cruellest gift was bestowing only a modicum of talent on a person, and yet he exploited what he had in a way that was all-consuming. He was a fascinating fusion of ambition and craft, coupled with an innate charm, and – after that first unsuccessful decade – an often unerring sense of timing.

He also deployed his curiosity as an analytical torch, repurposing in completely original ways, rarely embarrassed to claim something as his own. In that first, formative decade of his career, Bowie’s work bore a relation to many forebears, and it was only with ‘Space Oddity’ that he showed that he had a mind of his own, and genuine human purpose. (Having said that, at the time this was considered to be something of a novelty record, and it could have simply been regarded in the years afterwards as nothing more important than ‘Rock Me Amadeus’ by Falco, for instance, a novelty tie-in from a different era.) There are many who think that Bowie was unrelentingly calculating, carefully building his personae and his records like a bomb-squad technician, deciding which colour wire to snip, petrified that a mistake would end his seemingly inexorable righteous passage. In reality he just mixed things up as he went, using bits and pieces he’d collected along the way. And boy did he collect. The world of pop has always been prey to cryptomnesia, the psychological condition of ‘creating’ something already experienced, the accidental copying of something unknowingly overheard (the most famous example is George Harrison’s appropriation of the Chiffons’ ‘He’s So Fine’ for ‘My Sweet Lord’, which even the judge believed had been unintentional – even though he found him guilty). Bowie wasn’t un-aware when he lifted something; he knew.

‘There was always an exchange of information within our friendship,’ said Mick Jagger, after Bowie died. ‘And I suppose there was always an element of competition between us, but it never felt overwhelming. When he would see me, he’d give me a hug, and I could feel him going up behind the collar of my shirt to see what I was wearing. He used to copy me sometimes, but he’d be very honest about it. If he took one of your moves, he’d say, “That’s one of yours – I just tried it.” I didn’t mind sharing things with him, because he would share so much with me – it was a two-way street.’

He had undergone an apotheosis long before he died, but there is still an urgency about Bowie’s music, an urgency that makes it difficult to simply consign that music to the realm of myth and legend. It is unique. As Oliver Sacks wrote, in his beautiful little book Gratitude, ‘There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate – the genetic and neural fate – of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.’

Bowie’s ability to connect was something felt by everyone who fell under his spell. It somehow felt that he was talking to us all individually, and so consequently we tended to feel extremely protective of him, each of us imagining that we were the only person who really ‘got’ him. I was a highly impressionable twelve-year-old in the summer of 1972, and I too thought I might be the only person to ‘get’ David Bowie, little knowing that Top of the Pops had probably been seen by something like twelve and a half million people. Still, my interest was piqued, and in many ways I stayed interested for the rest of his life. The first thing I did – apart from unsuccessfully attempt to ape the Ziggy haircut – was start to collect anything and everything I could that was Bowie-related. But then I was always a terrible hoarder.

So many people felt they had a personal connection with David Bowie, and this became more than apparent when he died. As soon as he passed away, not only were all the social media channels full of music-related images, eulogies, and mini-blogs, but every national newspaper in the world had – seemingly in cahoots – decided to clear their front pages and carry a version of Brian Duffy’s genuinely iconic Aladdin Sane image. Bowie died during a period when the media was controlled by people who had grown up with him, whether they owned an iPhone 6 or edited a broadsheet. Everyone had a story to tell. The British fashion designer Pam Hogg, for instance, whose work often references Bowie, and who would go on to design the outfits worn onstage during the Bowie tribute at the Brits a month later, wrote this on her Instagram feed: ‘… always meet your heroes. Blitz club 1979 … I hear all this screaming. I thought it was a fight. A few mins later I literally bumped into someone on the dancefloor … near died when I realised it was David Bowie … we automatically laughed and danced … it was about 30 secs … a memory for a lifetime …’fn1

So many memories, so many stories. Like I say, I’d like to thank everyone who agreed to speak with me for this project, while I am especially indebted to Alan Edwards, who went out of his way to facilitate many of the interviews, continually espousing my good intentions. I really can’t thank him enough; he had no commercial incentive, and no reason to be so helpful, other than a sense of friendship (to me) and loyalty (to David). By which I mean that Alan wanted to help me get the story as ‘right’ as possible. I would also like to thank Kevin Doughten (for commissioning the book and for being such a collaborative, gifted and resolute editor; editors hate being edited, but you’ve made the book better in the process), Ed Victor (for brokering the deal), as well as Sarah Walter, Edie Walter Jones, and Georgia Sydney Jones, along with the wonderful Eleanor Halls, whose dedication, enthusiasm and ability to charm all conspired to make this a much better book than it would have been had she not been involved. She is a great journalist. Particular thanks are also due to Iman, Bill Zysblat (‘[David was] the rarest combination of genius and graciousness. I miss him every day. [He] was a quick study, from the first online fan club to the first securitization of royalties, David completely understood the underpinnings of the deals’), Rob Stringer, Tricia Jones, Trevor Dolby, Mark Russell, Alice Rawsthorne, Rosie Boy-cott, Chris Keskie, Mark Richardson, Matthew Hobbs, Nicky and Rob Carter, Rosie Goldsmith, Hanif Kureishi, John Pearson, Chris Charlesworth, Lottie Stanners, Linda Davis, Maria Padget, Robert Chalmers, Jonathan Heaf, Margot Farnham, Fiona Dealey, Julian Stockton, Olivia Cole, Anna Ford, Emma Reeves and Francine Stock. I am particularly indebted to Paul Gorman, Dorian Lynsky, Jason Heller, Michael Kaplan, Tony Oursler, and Alexis Petridis for allowing me to quote substantially from their pieces. Thank you also to the lovely Clare Shenstone (the inspiration for ‘Heroes’, and whose dream about swimming with dolphins is so central to the song), whom I spoke to at length about her connection with David, her time with him in Berlin, and the peripatetic nature of their relationship; in the end she decided she didn’t want her story told, however our own connection more than compensated for my initial disappointment at this. Thanks also to Jeffrey Morgan, and to Creem. All William Boyd’s quotes are copyright © William Boyd 2016. Erin Kean’s article first appeared in Salon.com at http://www.Salon.com. An online version remains in the Salon archives. Reprinted with permission.

Finally, I’d like to save the biggest thanks for my agent, Ed Victor, who died earlier in the year. Ed was my agent for fourteen of my books, but more importantly he was a dear friend of mine; not just a huge literary figure but a man you could count on when the going got tough. I miss him terribly.

INTRODUCTION TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

Two years after his death, David Bowie was still very much all over social media, still ingrained in Instagram, his face forever tattooed with the Aladdin Sane red and blue lightning bolt, a flash of quick-witted genius instigated by the man who shot the album cover, Brian Duffy. ‘I was looking for an iconic cover image and artwork that would help me to persuade RCA that Bowie was sufficiently important to warrant megastar treatment and funding, in order to propel him to exactly that status,’ Bowie’s teak-hard manager Tony Defries told Duffy’s son Chris a few years ago. ‘Engaging a master, world-class photographer to shoot the product/brand and to design the artwork was the best way to send that message. Brian had the ability to make the mundane image interesting and the interesting image fascinating.’

The lightning bolt – inspired partly by Elvis Presley’s TCB (‘Taking Care of Business’) logo, and partly by the logo on an old rice cooker in Duffy’s studio – has become the lingua franca of Bowie’s social media presence, an emoji-like transfer applied to exotic dolls, T-shirts, babies, animals, animated cartoon heroes and dead cultural icons, landscapes (#nofilter), underwear, mid-century modern furniture, po-mo hotel lobbies, and, of course, plenty of other photographs of David Bowie. Aladdin Sane is the Mona Lisa of pop. It has been abused by hundreds of street artists from Manchester to Sao Paulo, and is increasingly the first thing you notice about any book on Bowie. If, when alive, Bowie was everything and anything to us all – the grand conjurer of sonic wisdom, the wizard of sophisticated boom-boom, a tousled-haired over-cranked Mockney with a Marlboro Lite cackle and a delivery boy wink – in death he was immediately reduced to a felt-tip zig-zag.

In October 2014 I joined Instagram, late to the party but keen to get involved. I had previously joined Twitter, twice, but both times bowed out because I didn’t like it, and didn’t feel like manufacturing opinions on tap, only to be told they were the wrong ones. At first, I wasn’t quite sure how to use Instagram, and started doing what many people do, mixing marketing images (in my case, the latest photographic extravagances from GQ and Condé Nast), party pictures, family portraits and career greatest hits, with responses to news events, jokes, cultural and epicurean recommendations and reposts from people I found particularly amusing or prescient (initially The Fat Jewish on repeat). I spent the first few months trying to cultivate a feed that was sufficiently interesting without being too annoying (showing off without appearing to show off, which is the fundamental Instagram pivot), and usually failing.

I also started posting pictures of Bowie, obscure images that I didn’t think anyone else had seen, and reposting harvested images from other feeds that I found unusual, or potentially iconic (‘iconic’ being a big Instagram word). I called these posts dailybowie, and then a friend suggested I give it a hashtag, and file them every day. And so like thousands of other, equally obsessed fanboys and -girls, I have helped litter cyberspace with Bowie-related space junk. At first it was a celebration of a man reborn, then a memorialisation of a life well lived, and now it’s contributing to an ever-expanding parallel calendar of Bowiedom (a litany, I have to admit, slanted towards the blood-orange Ziggy). Sometimes it feels important, at other times aimless, and I suppose there will come a time when I will stop. But for the time being I’m enjoying subscribing to the theory that the world of David Bowie is a self-contained rolling-news reality co-existing with our own. It’s real, not hypothetical, a multiverse of constant recognition.

Which is an extremely roundabout way of saying that David Bowie is bigger in death than he was when he was alive, bigger even in 2018 then he was in 2016, and even bigger than he was a year before that. Like a continually expanding balloon that refuses to burst, post-Bowie Bowie – as well as his kingdom – just grows and grows and grows… still sounding more like the future than the past. If any proof were needed, then I would point you in the direction of almost anyone you know who likes him as much as you do. When they talk about him, it’s not ‘David Bowie was…’ – it’s ‘David Bowie is…’

Since the publication of the hardback of this book I’ve received some startling information regarding Bowie’s family, and specifically the much-referenced ‘madness’ contained therein, which is included in the Afterword. This new material sheds more than light on Bowie’s upbringing, ambitions and fears.

INTRODUCTION

‘It is indeed true,’ said someone from his management office when I contacted them that morning. ‘We found out about an hour ago, and we’re finding it very difficult to function. He really is gone.’ It was 6:40 in the morning, but I know I wasn’t the first person to call. Oddly, I heard myself through that by now rather old-fashioned form of communication, email, as various friends and colleagues sent messages, from both the UK and the US. I checked my Instagram feed, and saw a flurry of posts, iconic images accompanied by heartfelt commiserations and distress.

All of which obviously swirled around the shocking news itself. When people die, especially significant people, others can busy themselves, freely expressing emotion, offering professional consolation. With Bowie, it was different, as I know so few people whose lives were unaffected by him.

For me and members of my generation, the Bowie generation, his death was more momentous than John Lennon’s. Of course, it would be invidious to compare the two, but it is still difficult even now for me to grasp just how much he meant to me. I was a teenager when he emerged, and was one of the many people who saw his performance of ‘Starman’ on Top of the Pops in the summer of 1972, one of the many millions whose lives were altered at such an impressionable age.

For my generation, it is difficult to overemphasise just how important David Bowie was to us, not just in terms of music and fashion, but also in terms of how we carried – and continue to carry – ourselves in the world. I remember exactly where I was when I heard about Lennon’s death, but Bowie’s passing will stay with me in a more permanent way.

On the day Bowie’s death was announced, I was in the middle of Men’s Fashion Week at Victoria House in Holborn, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. It would be a cliché to say that everyone felt numb, but then clichés are clichés for a reason, because they’re true. Almost everyone in the building appeared to be moved. Some had fallen in love with him when they were teenagers, others had only come to him recently, discovering him as a heritage artist; but nearly all of them had a relationship with him and his music. Almost every show I saw that day made some kind of nod towards Bowie’s passing, and when I walked into the Burberry show in Kensington Gardens a few hours later, ‘Where Are We Now?’, his melancholic comeback single from 2013, was blasting across the park. As I sat waiting for the show to start, I got an email from a famous musician, one for whom Bowie had been a huge influence: ‘What is extraordinary and wonderful and a measure of the man is that the very last song David gave to us all is up there with some of his greatest tunes,’ he wrote, referring to a song on his final album, Blackstar – released the previous week, on his birthday. ‘He placed what is probably the best song on Blackstar (with its now poignant widow’s weeds of a cover) last. “I Can’t Give Everything Away,” he sings. An artist to the last. We are all David Bowie.’

I knew Bowie a little, and unlike many famous people who can have a little sheen rubbed off them when you meet them, Bowie became even more intriguing when I did, because his curiosity, his obsession for ‘the new’, appeared to be genuinely innate. The first time I met him, in 1982, he asked me for a light for his Marlboro. I was an extra on the dreadful vampire movie The Hunger, in which Bowie was starring with Catherine Deneuve. It was my job to walk up and down the metal stairs in Heaven, the gay nightclub underneath the arches in the Strand, in London, as ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ by Bauhaus blared out of the speakers. For a twenty-one-year-old Bowie obsessive this was a dream come true, a day that turned into an anecdote that would eventually kick-start a very odd relationship, one that continued for over thirty years. My last brush with Bowie happened the summer before he died, although it was merely a chance encounter with the landlords of the hotel Bowie had stayed in when he was building his house in upstate New York. It would be betraying a confidence to tell anyone what they told me, but it seems Bowie had not lost his ability to charm.

He was as important to the 70s as the Beatles were to the 60s, and yet his reach and his influence continue today in a way that we have yet to quantify, try as we might.

I knew he had been ill – many did – but I had no idea it was critical. Having been in touch for several decades, when he became sick around a decade ago – caused initially by a series of heart attacks – he disappeared from view. I knew he had bought a huge apartment complex in downtown New York, I knew the people who sold him his house in Woodstock, and I knew his personal publicist and management company extremely well. Yet recently every communication had been through a third party, almost as though he was pushing himself away from the world.

Like everyone who grew up with the man, Bowie would confound, annoy, and occasionally disappoint me, but I never found him less than fascinating.

Even when he became ill, he kept an almost obsessive eye on those in his orbit, especially if they were writing about him. A few years ago I wrote a book about Bowie’s performance on Top of the Pops in 1972, an extended essay that tried to form an opinion about the 70s from those four short minutes on a television programme. I needed various permissions from Bowie to use certain photographs in the book, and over a period of a few weeks he eventually agreed to me using them. However, I also included several facts in the book that I knew to be wrong – some descriptions of the BBC dressing room, some quotes, and some outfit changes that I knew to be inventions (as I had actually invented them). I did this as I hoped he might contradict me, and actually give me some more material for the book. Perhaps this was conceited, expecting him to actually read the manuscript, but then I also knew that he had the power to not release the pictures I needed. But Bowie remained mute: even though he had tacitly endorsed the book, he would rather I print the myth.

In fact, his entire professional career was one of myth, legend, and invention. Brilliantly so.

When I was writing my first Bowie book, as I was finishing the final chapters, I went to visit my father in Cheltenham, in his flat in the shadow of GCHQ (this turned out to be the last significant time I saw him before he died). He asked me what I was working on, and I told him that I was writing a book about Bowie’s extraordinary performance on TOTP, and how he influenced an entire generation of future music and fashion obsessives. When he asked me why, I reeled off the various elements of his performance that had been so challenging, so inspiring, and so transgressive. I described the way in which Bowie had toyed sexually with his guitarist Mick Ronson, the way in which he had dressed like a pansexual spaceman, the way he sashayed across the screen like a 1920s film star, and, saliently, the way in which his flame-red hair, his Day-Glo jumpsuit, and the general glam colour fest had almost colonised the programme. I explained that this was the moment when the 70s finally outgrew the 60s, when the monochrome world of boring, boring southeast England had exploded in a fiesta of colour.

My father looked at the floor, took a moment, and then said, very quietly: ‘You know we had a black-and-white television, don’t you?’

LIVING IN LIES BY THE RAILWAY LINE

1947–1969

He was a postwar baby, born in London in 1947. He was part of the new world, two years after the end of the old. A London baby. He went to school in Brixton before being cast out to the suburbs. Even when he was young he knew he wanted to be bigger than he was, wanted to be a bigger man. When he started to work in advertising he thought he’d broken through, but he had no idea what was to come. In the beginning, he was feeling his way – he was in the Kon-Rads, the King Bees, the Mannish Boys, David Jones and the Buzz, Davey Jones and the Lower Third, Feathers, the Hype – but he had no idea who he was going to be when he’d finished.

David Jones was born on 8 January 1947, at 40 Stansfield Road, Brixton, the son of a cinema usherette and a promotions officer for Barnardo’s. He lived there until he was six, when his family moved farther out to Bromley in Kent. While his father was middle class, his mother came from a poor, working-class family. David used to say that there was a dark cloud over her side of the family, as it was full of mental instability. When he let his guard down, or when he wanted to amplify that side of his upbringing, he would say that ‘tragically’ two or three of his aunts committed suicide. He would say that this seemed to be something he would hear constantly while growing up: How so-and-so has left us now. He said once, ‘I guess most of us have battled with reality and something else all of our lives. I think [my elder half-brother] Terry probably gave me the greatest, serviceable education that I ever could have had. He just introduced me to the outside things. The first real major event for me was when he passed Jack Kerouac’s On the Road on to me, which really changed my life. He also introduced me to people like John Coltrane, which was way above my head, but I saw the magic and I caught the enthusiasm for it because of his enthusiasm for it. And I kinda wanted to be like him.’ Terry – the savant of cool jazz – would adumbrate his life as a sort of ticking clock of impending, accelerated mortality. As for his mother’s sisters, his aunt Vivienne was diagnosed with schizophrenia, his aunt Una died in her late thirties having experienced periods in a mental institution as well as electric shock treatment, while Aunt Nora actually had a lobotomy because of her ‘bad nerves’.

DAVID BOWIE: I had a very happy childhood, seriously nothing wrong with it. I was lonely but I never really wanted and certainly never went hungry, but I obviously saw people deprived around me and kids going to school with their shoes falling apart and kids looking like urchins. It left an impression on me that I never ever wanted to be hungry, or at the wrong end of society.

KRISTINA AMADEUS (DAVID’S COUSIN): David’s parents, especially his father, ‘John’ Jones, encouraged him from the time he was a toddler. His mother, Peggy, spoke often of our deceased grandfather, who was a bandmaster in the army and played many wind instruments. David’s first instruments, a plastic saxophone, a tin guitar, and a xylophone, were given to him before he was an adolescent. He also owned a record player when few children had one. When he was eleven we danced like possessed elves to the records of Bill Haley, Fats Domino, and Elvis Presley. David’s father took him to meet singers and other performers preparing for the Royal Variety Performance. I remember one afternoon in the late 50s when David was introduced to Dave King, Alma Cogan, and Tommy Steele. ‘My son is going to be an entertainer too,’ he said. ‘Aren’t you, David?’ ‘Yes, Daddy,’ David squeaked in his childish high-pitched voice, his face flushed and beaming with pride. Although Uncle John never lived to see David’s huge success, he was convinced it would become a reality.

WENDY LEIGH (BIOGRAPHER): David grew up petted and privileged. He wasn’t a working-class hero by any stretch. It was actually quite a suburban life, even though it was in South London, in Brixton. His father was the number-one PR at Dr Barnardo’s, so David was immersed in the idea of presentation from a very young age. He was taken to all the shows by his father, introduced to celebrities, and he learned how to promote, how to sell himself. No one ever talks about the fact that he was incredibly influenced by his father, who had access to this exciting outside world. Every performer needs to be a great seducer, and David learned that from an early age. His father showed him a lot of love. He showed him how to get on, how to charm, and how to practise the art of being nice.

GEORGE UNDERWOOD (CHILDHOOD FRIEND): His dad was lovely, a really nice gentle man. His mum, well, even David didn’t like his mum. She wasn’t an easy person to get on with. She was very cold. Very insular. I think that’s why he liked coming round to my house, because my parents were totally different. ‘Hello, David, want a cup of tea, David?’ My parents were very welcoming, but this wasn’t what would happen round at his house. Mrs Jones would hardly ever say anything to me. I’m not sure what it was, but she was never happy. She always gave David such a hard time.

DAVID ARDEN (MANAGER): I was brought up in Brixton around the same time as David Bowie, and everyone thinks it was a tough place, but it was actually rather nice and full of variety artists. Half the houses were owned by [Trinidadian pianist] Winifred Atwell, who had bought them for investment purposes, and she used to rent them out to music-hall acts and light entertainers. John Major lived a few streets away from me, and his dad was an acrobat and juggler. It later turned into a rougher neighbourhood, but at the time we were brought up there it was very arty-crafty. If you were an artist in London, in music hall or variety, or in showbiz of one kind or another, that’s where you lived. So Bowie was surrounded by this extremely artistic community. It was vibrant in that way. He wasn’t just a performer, wasn’t just a singer-songwriter, he was an artist, and he got that because of where he was brought up. I’d go into the arcade in Brixton, under the railway arches, and buy my reggae and jazz records there, and David would do the same thing. We had local people round to dinner all the time, and they were all in the business, people like Dickie Henderson. There were also lots of places to go and see acts too, as the area fed off the people who lived there. So it’s no surprise he turned out the way he did.

ANNE BRIGGS (NEIGHBOUR): For a time as children we lived at Clapham in South London and were regular visitors to Brixton Market. There were all manner of traders, hawkers, stalls selling anything – technicolour clothing which only the new residents of Brixton would wear, fruit piled up on shiny green fake grass cloths, vegetables of all kinds, and barrow boys with such constant and witty sales patter that people would gather round to listen and heckle. There were the West Indian traders with their Caribbean vegetables and lilting speech encouraging passersby to try their vegetables and fruit. Then there were buskers, always with their promoters, either providing music or awe-inspiring feats of physical flexibility, jugglers or occasionally sword swallowers, all with their constant conversation attracting the crowd. Tanks of writhing eels in slightly murky water alongside stalls shrouded in white selling the little pots of jellied eels – no doubt to emphasise their freshness … Cockles, winkles and shrimps were measured in old half pint and pint tankards. Pills and potions offering miracle cures of some sort or another – if we hovered to try and read the packets we were whisked away.

GEOFF MACCORMACK (CHILDHOOD FRIEND): I first met David when I was seven, at Burnt Ash Primary School, when he moved to Bromley – we had little brown uniforms. I’d already met George Underwood when I was four, at the local church school, St Mary’s. I was in the cubs with David, in the choir together. We bonded over music, and both loved rock and roll, and as we grew older loved Little Richard. The Britain we grew up in was really quite grubby. There were still rations until the 50s, and you’d walk to school via bomb sites. The music was bad, there was no decent food, and everything was grey, so when American music came along it completely changed everything. David’s father used to fund-raise with the stars of the day, people like Dickie Henderson and Tommy Steele.

I initially thought David was an only child, as he was only ever the only child in the house. I only found out much later that he had a brother. We never discussed it. I think it was a mutual understanding, as I had a brother who left home early to join the forces. He moved abroad and he wasn’t in my life either. So it was almost a mirror thing. David had a good relationship with his father, and he was always quite generous. He would always buy him records, and he got a lot of records through work. His father used to get American music that we’d never heard before and most of the country had never heard before. Most of the rock and roll we heard in this country was rerecorded by British artists for labels like Embassy that we used to buy in Woolworths. So to hear the real thing was quite rare and a real treat. David had Fats Domino’s ‘Blueberry Hill’ when that came out, ‘Hound Dog’ by Elvis Presley. He also had ‘I Put a Spell on You’ by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, although David’s mother wouldn’t let him play it in the house as she thought it was the devil’s music, which I suppose it was in a way. Our favourite was Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers, ‘I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent’. When he did The Next Day, I told him I loved it, and he actually said, ‘It’s not “I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent”, but it’ll do.’ I remember him lending me a couple of records and I left them on the windowsill in the breakfast room at home, and they melted in the sun. It was really upsetting to him when I gave them back to him. About seven years ago I came across a bunch of 78s, including Frankie Lymon and ‘Hound Dog’, and I had a case made and sent them to him.

We had an upbeat relationship that was based around stupidity and silliness. It was always like that, and that’s what we provided, fun in each other’s lives. So it never occurred to me to ask questions about his family, as it seemed intrusive. And not what we were about. He never asked me about family life either. Everything was at face value. But David was a born performer. That was the drive, the ambition. He wanted to express himself. We drifted apart for a while when we went to different schools. George and David were art school boys, whereas I went to a secondary modern. I was a mod. I would go up to the West End, get some purple hearts, go to the Scene, the Flamingo, Discotheque. Whereas George and David were on the fringes, going to jazz clubs. We always stayed in contact but then reconnected when we were living in the same area around South Kensington in the 60s. I suppose we were pseudo-French then, trousers with turn-ups, brogues, and bikes with an engine on the front wheel.

CONTENTS

ABOUT THE BOOK

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

INTRODUCTION

1

LIVING IN LIES BY THE RAILWAY LINE

1947–1969